Writing in a US newspaper earlier this month, a leading expert on Al-Qaeda at Harvard University courted controversy by suggesting that people in the United States should spend more time listening to the demands of Islamic extremists.
Derided by critics as an apologist for Al-Qaeda, Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou questioned the US reaction to the September 11 attacks in an article that observers say demonstrates a more open public debate about responses to Osama bin Laden and his conspirators.
“Since the attacks on New York and Washington, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have delivered, respectively, 18 and 15 messages via audio or videotape making a three-part case: The United States must end its military presence in the Middle East, its uncritical political support and military aid of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, and its support of corrupt and coercive regimes in the Arab and Muslim world,” wrote Mohamedou in the Boston Globe under the headline “Time to talk to Al Qaeda?”
He said that “developing a strategy for the next phase of the global response to Al Qaeda requires understanding the enemy”.
Mohamedou cited the analysis of the former head of the “bin Laden unit” at the CIA, Michael Scheuer, who is now a fierce critic of the Bush administration and its “War on Terror” policy.
During a recent speech at the US Army War College, Scheuer said that both militant and non-militant Muslims hated the United States “for what we do in the Islamic world, not for our democratic beliefs and civil liberties”.
The speech was called “no strategy can defeat an enemy you refuse to understand”.
The willingness of academics and opinion leaders in the US to address the issue in public reveals a change in the political climate inside the United States, according to some observers.
Francois Burgat, a leading expert on the Arab world at France’s national research institute, the CNRS, said the change in tone was “the start of a critical reassessment of the logic of the whole security policy”.
He continued: “The evolution is doubtless the result of a worsening of the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The lessons of the attacks in London have also been learnt: the threat of terrorism can resist the formidable security deployment.”
Another academic, an expert in responses to disasters at New York University, Allen Zerkin, said that governments would have to seek a truce with Al-Qaeda sooner or later.
“To be sure, the terrorists can’t win this war, but neither can we,” he said, citing examples in Britain with the IRA and in France with the FLN from Algeria.
Research by Robert Pape at Chicago University has also challenged the commonly held belief that the motivations for terrorism are religious fanaticism.
Pape said he was “surprised” to discover from the study of 463 suicide bombings that “what over 95 percent of all suicide attacks around the world since 1980 until today have in common is not religion, but a clear, strategic objective: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.”
